


BLACK DREAM WAR MACHINE

by radioactivesunrise



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Gets a Hug, Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, BAMF Ahsoka Tano, But Beggars Cant Be Choosers And Theres a Space War On, Darth Maul Lives, Darth Maul Redemption, F/F, F/M, Maybe Not the Hug She Wanted, Order 66 (Star Wars), Post-Order 66 (Star Wars), Sith Ahsoka Tano, Soulmates AU, soulmates!maulsoka
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-17 21:27:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29478426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/radioactivesunrise/pseuds/radioactivesunrise
Summary: In the chaotic aftermath of Order 66, Darth Maul awakens grievously injured on Tatooine, with no memory of how he came to be there. As he teeters on the brink of death, a mysterious force wielder activates an ages old magic within him, which heals him, but binds him to her until death. Post Order-66 Soulmates!Maulsoka AU.
Relationships: Ahsoka Tano/Asajj Ventress, Darth Maul/Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 14
Kudos: 23





	BLACK DREAM WAR MACHINE

_**ANNIHILATION** _

-

On the fourth day, he starts to come back. 

Just blips of consciousness at first- pin pricks of ludicity against a black velvet sleep. He feels the scratch of rough linen against his skin, the sound of a guttural language being spoken around him, blinding, bone-deep pain… 

It's that last part he can't seem to hold on to. The pain is ever present and endless, ripping him time and again from consciousness, and leaving no memory of this having happened before. 

He is trapped in a loop. 

Pain and sleep. Sleep and pain. 

Over and over again.

-

Then the blips start to build. 

Voices he can tell apart. Smells he can identify. “I need water” are his first words. The water comes, and he remembers it. The next time his eyes peel open, he asks again- “Water- I need water.” It feels cold on his tongue, escapes from the corners of his lips, streaks down his cheeks and jaw. Someone brushes the water from his skin with a rough cloth, and just like that, he's awake and fully aware. 

He blinks, his eyes adjusting to the light. Above him is a stretched animal pelt roof. He tries to move his head. He fails.

His eyes roll back in his skull, his throat gagging as his body shakes. He is somewhere soft, away from his body, watching it rattle like a marionette, and it occurs to him for the first time that he might be utterly, irreparably broken. 

-

Broken, perhaps. 

But _alive._

-

They feed him gruel of some kind. It’s fatty and rich, probably a fermented bone broth with grain starch. Food for a child, or a dying man. 

It's a guess, of course. He doesn’t speak Tusken, and they don’t speak Galactic Basic. Maybe it was better that way. They must think he is an ally, and he needs them for an embarrassing amount of _everything_. He can’t feed himself. Can’t piss on his own. Can’t so much as lift his own head. 

Something lithe dances across his consciousness- a memory, perhaps. A fighter. A woman. He tries to catch her face, to remember the shape his lips made when he spoke her name, but she flits away. 

A shadow flying from the flame.

-

On the twelfth day he feels _it_ \- a dead, empty silence, lapping gently at his mind like a distant sea tonguing the shoreline. It's there on the air that creeps along his skin- like salt, like smoke.

_Annihilation._

He freezes, uncomprehending, unsure. It’s an infuriating weakness of his, this slowness to fully realize death. But now that it's arrived, now that he's been able to call it by its name, the weight of it crushes the air out of his chest. He must make some kind of sound, because the Tusken is back, trying to hold him down as he strains to breathe under the death rattles of countless thousands of jedi and younglings. They swarm him, bore into his flesh like leeches, and sate their sanguivorous appetite on what slender healing he had managed for himself. As they do he sees their eyes as life leaves them, hears the final shutter of their hearts, tastes the acid tang of mortal terror in their drying saliva.

But in this storm of hungry ghosts, it is the younglings that engrave their pain into his flesh. The pain of a child is always more potent than an adult- it's the fear that's the difference. A child's terror rings at a pitch an adult can never again reach, because a child knows the truth of death better than an adult. They're closer to the nothingness of their Before, and remember it better. Their fear- it sears, it broils, it chars. Someone is screaming as if scalded, their voice abrading the very air that chokes him, but it's no use. 

It's inside him now.

-

It is days before he crosses the bridge back consciousness again.

-

It’s almost like his ears are ringing, the Force has been so loud in his mind for so many years. Shifting waves of dark and light, the heat of it erupting all around him in battle, the way walls of it would swallow him as a child, and his eyes would roll back into his skull and he would collapse and a rattle on the floor. 

It had been a long time since a force user could drop him like that. He can’t even remember the last time it happened, but that only matters now because they never would again. He shakes his head and it explodes in a pain so brilliant, so ruthless he leans over the side of his cot and vomits. 

He deserves it. 

That kind of sentimentality is useless. He forces himself to connect the two, to stitch the pain to his grasping for the past, and seals it with the sensory memory of bile in his sinuses. _If you remember nothing else, at least remember this_ , he thinks, as a large raider shuffles over to his cot. _Remember, remember-_

He cannot afford to break a fifth time. He might not survive it.

The raider catches his jaw, holding it in place as they bend over him with an eye dropper full of fluid. He tries to turn his head, but he is too weak to fight them. He can’t even raise his arms, can’t even force a sound out of his mouth. The raider drops a little bit of liquid onto the seam of his eyelids. They’re screwed shut, but it doesn’t matter, the fluid finds its way into his eye all the same. It stings for a minute, and then the world starts to swim.

_No- fight it! Remember, remember-_

But he can’t, not when the blackness swallowing him is this soft, not when the wailing silence of the force seems like such a far away thing. 

Let the rest of the universe figure it out. He can’t fight anything anymore. Not even sleep.

-

He lets it hang in the air, considering it as if it were a piece of fruit on the cusp of ripeness. 

The Jedi are dead. The padawan too.

Does Sidious know that he is alive?

-

He must, Maul decides. It is morning- he senses coolness on the breeze, but dry heat in the air. A desert then. Must be Tatooine.

"How did I get here?," he croaks. 

The large Tusken shakes his- her- their- head. 

He tries again, this time in Zabraki. The Tusken turns their head to the side, raising their arm in the air and pointing towards the sky. 

"Did I just... fall from the sky?," he croaks.

The Tusken shakes their head. 

"Do you speak Zabraki?"

The Tusken shakes their head again. 

So much for that.

-

It is a young girl Tusken who explains it to him, and not in a language anyone else can understand. There is a pin prick of Force within her- which glows all the more brightly given the silence of the Force throughout the universe- and she artlessly lobs the image of his fall at him as he tries again to bridge the language divide that separates him from the knowledge of how he came to be here. It's there as if it had only just happened moments ago- his body, a flash of red falling through darkness. He makes no sound as he lands, the vibration of his collision dulled by the sand.

He turns his head to her so fast the room spins a little and his eyes lock on hers. As if understanding his unspoken question, she throws another image at him- his body, bleeding, too still, limbs bent at impossible angles. 

He puts together a patchwork of sounds he thinks is Tusken enough to understand- _how long ago did I fall?_

The girl stares. 

He tries again.

_How many darknesses between now and the fall?_

She runs away.

-

He doesn't want to do it, but it must be done. He makes eye contact with the large Tusken- his carer- and _pushes_.

The images are triplicate: the young Tusken with the pinprick of Force within her, an image of Skywalker- _Lord Vader-_ and the fallen bodies of padawan. Some of it had to be constructed, so it doesn't feel as real as a true memory would, but he doesn't have enough energy or time to explain. _He will come for her,_ he tries in his best Tusken. _And he will kill her._

The Tusken startles and jerks back, retreating from him as if he'd pulled a knife on them. They start babbling, and oddly, he catches enough words to parse what they're saying. 

"A Jedi," Maul confirms.

"He... will make death...?," the Tusken asks in broken Zabraki.

Maul nods.

The Tusken disappears through the door of the tent. 

Maul can’t wait for them to reappear. Exhaustion yanks him into darkness before his next breath. He can do no more.

-

The slender fighter is back in his dreams. She is less graceful than she is confident, but a joy to watch, even if he is her opponent. She glides across a marble floor on her tip toes, her feet ringing musically as they collide with the glass of a shattered window. What is it about her face that makes it so hard remember? All he has is an impression- sharp, watchful- but of course she would be. She is fighting a powerful Sith, could she afford to be anything but? 

By their very nature no Sith was to be trusted. 

Surely she knew that.

-

When he awakens the Tusken girl is beside him, as still as stone. Do Tusken children not fiddle as Zabrakis do? Their eyes meet, and she begins to cry. Oh for Force sake. 

He reaches inside him and draws a thin strand of Force as it flows through him, and reaches out to touch her hand. As he does, he sends an image her way. In his mind's eye he shows her the force within her. He shows her how to hide it, to dull it's siren's call to other force wielders. He shows her himself as he remembers he was before he came to this bed, before the fall that so thoroughly broke him. He assures her that he just needs time to heal and he will be able to fight again. He’ll fight Vader, he’ll _kill_ him, and claw back everything that rightfully was his, and all will go back to how it was.

But then something occurs to him that hadn’t before. The fighter, the one who’s movements made music as she skated across the marble floor- she had wielded the force, and well too. Was she Jedi or Sith? Though he could feel the Force pulse powerfully within her, he could sense no polarity. 

He tries to make sense of it but can’t, and he can’t _feel_ her- can’t feel her anywhere. Can’t recognize even the faintest of Force signatures. When he reaches to the edges of his abilities, the universe is cold and empty and _still._ Unnaturally so. Abiogenetic. Still like how his body had landed in the sand- silently, without tectonic impact, a mangled mess of impossible angles. An image of her face begins to congeal, her sharp features piercing the surface tension of his damaged cognition. He thinks it breathlessly, before he can stop himself: _she’s beautiful._

He pauses.

_Why shouldn’t he call her beautiful?_

His muscles tense for the impact of the answer, but none ever comes. Images rise instead- his hand outstretched to her, his heart railing against his ribcage as if to fight it’s way out and offer itself to her personally. Her eyes lock on his, and something electric moves between them, and when her gaze finally drops from his he sees her for what truly is. A motherless girl, a godless soldier, a dweller in the slender light of a door almost closed. 

His heart squeezes roughly in his chest. 

Where is she now? Why can he not feel her?

The Force within him rises in response, a delicate clockwork of enmeshed flesh and midichlorians pulsating gently, and then, as if in defiance of death itself, mortally crushed nerves in his body begin to blink suddenly back to life. 

Pain strung like pearls lights up his spine, where the crushed discs pinning him on his back become electrified. The veins in his brain constrict sharply, and his headache melts away, but not before the capillaries in his eyes burst open like new blooms in early spring, staining the slender whites of his eyes red. The muscles of his abdomen ripple, his back arches and any untrained eye watching would see a broken man, alone, near death, seizing on a cot.

But they’d be wrong.

-

Sunrise finds Maul sitting in meditation on his cot and assessing his cybernetic lower half. It has seen the worst of the damage to his body, and repairs will be expensive. Several vagal support functions have been critically damaged, and he won’t be able to fully stand until they are repaired. He is missing parts of his legs as well, several gears are warped beyond function, and everything below his left knee swings freely, with response to nervous system commands.

As for what is left of his body, there is not much unscathed. Every rib is broken, and several will need bracing until they are fully healed. His spine is a jigsaw puzzle that will take Zabraki healing to solve, and it’s only by the grace of the Force alone that he’s able to rise into sitting at all. His entire left arm will need a cast- everything from the hand to the shoulder is shattered, including the rotator cuff, and he’d be lucky to keep it at all at this stage. 

The first light of dawn breaks outside the tent. He doesn’t see it, he senses the dissolving of the desert night’s chill, melting away to a grim but ill-remembered threat. You could die of thirst in this land, it’s true, but you could just as easily freeze. Every twelve on the clock brought a new enemy to your doorstep. 

Maul blinks at the shock of sunlight in his eyes.

Let Tatooine do it’s worst. Let Sidious do his. 

On his back is no way for an Opress to die.

**Author's Note:**

> If you know me for my hunger games fic, and specifically if you're here wondering where the next chapter of RADIO is, I'm sorry I'm like this.


End file.
